Here we are on a Friday night. It’s only 8 pm, but it’s already dark where I am. The weather is a little cool, and all things combined, it’s feeling like a “movie on the couch” kind of night. While browsing through the numerous streaming services we subscribe to, I was having trouble finding something I want to watch. But then a post on Instagram pointed the way for me.
In it’s entirety on YouTube is a movie from 1986 that I used to love watching with my old man when I was young. We had recorded it off of a pay channel like Cinemax or The Movie Channel at some point, and all through the late ’80s, he’d pull that tape out and pop it in the VCR to rewatch it. The movie is Thunder Run. It’s about a truck driver who gets lured out of retirement to haul a load of plutonium from Nevada to Arizona, and along the way, he has to fight off domestic terrorists who want the load. While that premise alone is a good one, it’s got the added benefit of being something like an extended episode of The A-Team.
With the job to haul the plutonium came a big payday. Our hero in this movie took a chunk of that money and bought a rig, and outfitted it with all sorts of cool weapons and such to fight off the terrorists. The whole movie is a fun, action-packed, thrill ride, and I’m going to give it another watch tonight. I thought I’d share it here too. If you haven’t seen it, I suggest carving out an hour and a half at some point and giving it a watch. It’s a great way to spend 90 minutes.
Somehow, this Ernest offering had eluded me throughout my life, as I had never even heard of it before listening to the podcast. So I had to do a little research on this lost gem and see what it was all about. As it turns out, Ernest Goes to Splash Mountain was a special created by, and aired on The Disney Channel on July 7, 1989, as a way to promote their newest Disneyland attraction. It would later air in syndication beginning in August.
In the special, Ernest trains as America’s first “Splashtranaut” destined to become the very first person to conquer the mountain. Ralph Story, a veteran news anchor, and his team are determined to cover the momentous event from every angle possible.
I looked it up on YouTube, and it exists in its entirety, so I am presenting it here to you in case you’re like me and have never seen it before. Enjoy.
By now, you should certainly know how I feel about Pizza Hut from back in the day. It was one of the best dining experiences you could find in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I’m so nostalgic for that period of time at the Hut, that I’m always on the lookout for anything associated with it from then.
I came across this old training video from 1988 that I guess was what new hires had to sit and watch at the beginning of their employment. It’s a basic video on various pizza construction and some quality stuff, but things like this are like catnip for me. I could sit and watch this over and over. Well, at least a few times anyway.
But when you have 15-20 minutes to spare, give it a watch and it will transport you back to those good old days of Pizza Hut.
Spend your New Year’s Eve enjoying this retro night of entertainment via the 1992 MTV New Year’s Eve Special. It’s a 30-year-old time capsule featuring Cindy Crawford, MC Hammer, Bell Biv Devoe, Marky Mark, EMF, Naughty By Nature, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Guns n Roses!
In today’s Retro Ramblings, I’m supplying you with a full-length Christmas movie to watch. It’s a made-for-TV Christmas movie from 1987. And it stars Bo and Luke Duke (well, the actors anyway) driving a big rig full of presents to Alaska. Can you think of any Christmas movie that sounds cooler than this? Well, with the exception of Rocky IV.
Somehow I went almost all of my life without knowledge of this movie’s existence. Then a couple of years ago I was browsing through a TV Guide from 1987 and saw an ad for it. That ad stopped me in my tracks. I immediately went on a hunt for the movie. IT wasn’t on YouTube or any streaming service, and I couldn’t even rent it from Amazon. So I turned to some pirate services and I found it. They say the best things in life are worth waiting for, and in this case, they may be right. I thoroughly enjoyed it when I finally got to watch it.
Here is the synopsis from Google:
Two feuding brothers and one’s teenage son spend four days in an 18-wheeler taking toys from California all the way to Alaska, facing blizzards and their own complicated history together.
Looking at the time this came out, it seems logical that this was the first project that either John Schneider or Tom Wopat worked on after wrapping up their hit TV series The Dukes of Hazzard. And it caught both of them at a great time. The dynamic of their characters in this is unique. While Tom Wopat’s character seems very much in line with his Luke Duke character, John Schneider’s character is a 180 degree flip from Bo Duke…at least at the beginning of the film. But that just adds to the allure of this movie. It may seem cheesy at times, but at the end of the day, I was certainly glad I discovered it and it has worked its way into my Christmas movie rotation. Not quite on a yearly basis yet, but every other year.
I thought I would share this with you this year in case you’ve never heard of it, or have heard of it but didn’t know how available it was now. So when you have some time on your hands this holiday season, give it a watch.
If you’re like me, you just can’t get into the modern Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. While parades, in general, are still very much entertaining, the modern parade features way too much current pop culture for my tastes. I prefer my pop culture to be the ’80s and/or ’90s centric. So I’m presenting you with an alternative to today’s parade with this full video of the 1985 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. This way you can still enjoy a parade, and at the same time take a walk down memory lane.
We all have some TV shows that we were very fond of that didn’t last more than a season. Well, in this edition of Retro Ramblings, I want to talk about a show that never made it past the pilot that I was a huge fan of. Tag Team.
In the mid-late ’80s, professional wrestling, and the WWF in particular, was big business. A lot of the WWF superstars were becoming household names thanks to Vince McMahon and his traveling circus. Two of the better-known superstars were “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Jesse “The Body” Ventura. Piper had spent years as the biggest bad guy wrestler on the roster, while Ventura was well known as one of the voices of the shows as color commentator. Each broke out of the WWF world to become moderate successes in Hollywood. Piper had starring roles in B – Movies like Body Slam, Hell Comes to Frogtown, and They Live. Meanwhile, Jesse was becoming a solid backup man in action flicks with Running Man and Predator.
In 1991, they teamed up on the small screen in the pilot episode of Tag Team. The show’s premise was simple. These two wrestlers couldn’t wrestle for a living anymore, so they decide to become cops. That decision was made after they used their wrestling moves to stop a robbery at a grocery store. It was a simple idea, but one that a television series could conceivably be based around.
As the air date for the pilot episode drew closer, Vince McMahon was hyping the debut of the show on his wrestling shows, and as a 13-year-old wrestling fan, I was salivating. I marked the date and time on my calendar so I wouldn’t miss it. Here was another chance to inject more wrestling into my world, and I wasn’t going to miss it. Although I can’t recall what night of the week that this premiered, I DO remember getting everything set up in my room for it. My chair was at the right angle, I had a frosty beverage at my side and some sort of snack at the ready. I was pumped.
As I remember it, the episode was pretty good, and I thought it was really cool that these two wrestlers were going to be in a television show every week. Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of just how exactly television worked at that time, and was quite disappointed when the show never aired again. The series wasn’t picked up, and the show was thrown into the huge pile of “could’ve been” with hundreds of other series that were never picked up.
I listened to a podcast featuring Ventura and Piper that was recorded a long time ago before Piper passed away, and Ventura explained why the series wasn’t picked up. The two companies who were producing the show together, Disney and Corelco, got into a lawsuit with each other over something not even remotely related to the Tag Team series, and while in litigation, the show was left in limbo since neither side was doing business with each other at the time. When the lawsuit dust settled, too much time had passed and the Tag Team series was abandoned.
It’s a real shame because the two had great chemistry together in the pilot, the premise was solid for an action/comedy show, and would have probably drawn decent enough ratings to keep the 13–episode first season on the air. Whether it would have been picked up beyond that is anyone’s guess, but I know one 13-year-old who would have watched religiously.
Watch the pilot below and decide for yourself if it had a shelf life or not.
